"… Coming out at the tail end of hip-hop’s “Golden Age” (1987-1994), in the same year as Gang Starr’s Hard To Earn, O.C.’s brilliant but slept on Word . . . Life, Common’s Resurrection, Biggie’s Ready to Die, and many other great records, Illmatic’s subtle and powerful brilliance rests in Nas’s detailed descriptions, dense reportage, and visually stunning rhymes of the underbelly of the beast. Like the 1965 landmark masterpiece film The Battle of Algiers, which captured the Algerian resistance against French colonialism, Illmatic brilliantly blurred the lines between fiction and documentary – creating a heightened sense of realism and visceral eloquence for Nas’s renegade first person narratives and character-driven odes. And like The Battle of Algiers, Illmatic was about the stories of everyday people caught in the most horrific of circumstances, or as Nas referred to it – “the devil’s lasso.” Though Nas’s narration of life in Queensbridge didn’t have the explicit political project and radical liberationist thrust shown in The Battle of Algiers, Nas’s lyrics captured an urgency and immediacy about life at the tattered edges of the American empire. Through Illmatic you could hear the echoes of secret wars and you could see the picture it captured of a particular moment, a photo that revealed, among other things, the brutal reality of the failure of the post-Civil Rights romanticism, the crack war bum rush, that COINTELPRO worked, and that the new prisons caged the rebel that may have proved to be that messiah… … All of these pieces make this project a unique collective insight into the possibilities and pitfalls of not only hip-hop, but also the world that we all inhabit. The post-9/11 moment that we now endure has hit the reset button on a whole host of things, erasing so much that has made America what it is, while also centering things that continue to remind us in case we forgot. But hip-hop at its best was always that constant reminder, that battle cry that spoke truth to power. In many ways Illmatic, and hip-hop for that matter, made visible what was not seen, having prophesized so much about where things are at: it had a clairvoyance about America’s penchant for militarism and war, an insight into the country’s cash rules philosophies, and an omen about nation’s gangster ethos. Using Illmatic as our weapon, Born to Use Mics chronicles and probes that American landscape in that war against oblivion, arguing not just for hip-hop’s continued relevance, but also for its urgent necessity…" - Excerpt of Introduction to Born to Use Mics: “It Was Written” by Sohail Daulatzai
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 06:07:38 +0000
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